Positive Reinforcement Culture

What is your ratio of praise to criticism?

How many of your team could state your vision and values (without looking at the poster on the wall)?

Do you have a positive culture?

‘Mondayitis’ is a feeling many people relate to - the “Oh no, I have to go to work” feeling. This state of mind is indicative of a disengaged team member. “It’s a job”, “I’ve got to pay the bills”, “It sucks but it puts food on the table and a roof over our head” are other variations of this. 

Attitudes like this suck the life blood out of organisations. Team members like this look for faults to justify their lousy outlook and, in seeking all that is wrong, that is what they inevitably find. This poisonous outlook infects other team members and very quickly the stench of a blame culture permeates the organisation. Business owners and managers unwittingly catch this infection and zero in on the offending culprits, watching their every move and finding fault with all these people do, sharing their dissatisfaction with others and so the rot continues - top down and bottom up.

How badly do you think this affects the bottom line results?

What about staff churn rates?

Customer satisfaction scores?

Likely you do not need to read the screeds of research to know that happy workplaces are more productive, profitable, have greater staff retention and much higher customer satisfaction scores. 

If you are thinking - “Oh, we are not too bad!”, look again at the opening three questions in this article. How did you do with answering those?  An HBR article “The Ideal Praise-to-Criticism Ratio” shared the following: “The factor that made the greatest difference between the most and least successful teams, Heaphy and Losada found, was the ratio of positive comments (“I agree with that,” for instance, or “That’s a terrific idea”) to negative comments (“I don’t agree with you” “We shouldn’t even consider doing that”) that the participants made to one another. (Negative comments, we should point out, could go as far as sarcastic or disparaging remarks.) The average ratio for the highest-performing teams was 5.6 (that is, nearly six positive comments for every negative one). The medium-performance teams averaged 1.9 (almost twice as many positive comments than negative ones.) But the average for the low-performing teams, at 0.36 to 1, was almost three negative comments for every positive one.”

Do you have a culture of praise?  Not vague, passive praise - “Great job today, guys” but specific praise individually given to people in a timely fashion. Ken Blanchard in his number one bestseller “The One Minute Manager” coined the phrase “Catching people doing things right”!

As team members, focus on living your values (and therefore creating your culture) and ‘catching’ other team members doing the same, (finding ways to give positive feedback to reinforce this behaviour) team enjoyment, engagement and productivity all increase.

Encourage your team to start (or continue!) looking for what is right and affirming more of the words and behaviour that they want to be around and you will be amazed how this “soft stuff” delivers rock solid bottom line results!

Here’s to your success!